Ding! Ding! Ding!

Humza Yousaf can't help himself. Every time he opens his mouth things get worse.

A quick late-night roundup of another wild day in the SNP’s crisis. I’m doing things back-to-front this edition and starting with culture corner for reasons that will become obvious.

Culture Corner: Father Ted’s Car

Here Father Ted notices that the car the parish has been gifted for a raffle has a small dent in it after he ran over a cyclist. Ted thinks he can straighten out the ding with a tap from a hammer only to find himself destroying the whole vehicle.

Humza Yousaf is Ted and the SNP is the car.

He thinks he has the political skills to smooth things out but with every DING! of his hammer he’s slowly creating a wreck. And he just can’t stop himself.

He told the press in the morning that the party had concealed the fact that the SNP’s auditors had resigned back in September. DING!

Oh yeah, and he indicated that he knew the reason why the SNP’s auditors had quit but he couldn’t tell us. DING!

What’s more, he told journalists, he wasn’t sure whether the party would be able to meet its legal responsibility to submit accounts to the Electoral Commission in July. It was confirmed later that they had notified the commission of this. DING!

For a mere mortal that would have been enough, but he wasn’t finished.

His ITV border interview was about whether he would suspend Peter Murrell’s party membership. DING!

Then on STV, he was engaging in commentary over whether his leadership has been delegitimized by recent events. “I’m very confident the party will unite,” he reassured us. DING!

And to finish the day, at five o’clock he released a video on the party’s social media feed urging people not to “lose faith”. DING!

He thought he had it there a while ago, you know.

Yousaf’s sentiment was echoed by the candidate who nearly defeated him. She pleaded with members: “Stay the course. Even if you’re scunnered. Don’t quit.”

When a minister is a liability on the media you can bench them for a while, get them some communications training or reshuffle them to a less high-profile role. When the liability is your leader the only choice is to tell them their time is up.

But remember Yousaf has been the leader for two weeks. By normal standards of politics, this is his honeymoon.